8.3 An industry representative visits Loray Mills

Richard H. Edmonds Pays Visit To Loray Mills

(Charlotte Observer)

With an abundance of southern labor waiting to take jobs left by strikers, mill officials of this section have little to fear from strikers, said Richard H. Edmonds, editor of the Manufacturers’ Record of Baltimore, yesterday after making a study of the strike situation at Loray mills and other nearby manufacturing establishments.

Mr. Edmonds visited every department of the Loray mills yesterday, he said, and found that 1,147 people were at work out of a force of 1,150, which is employed when the mill is running full.

“There are plenty of strikers, but their jobs are all taken by people who are glad to work,” he said. Mr. Edmonds quoted the Loray officials as saying that they didn’t intend to hire any of the strikers again.

There doesn’t seem to be any real grievance,” according to Mr. Edmonds. “The strike leaders have just gotten a hold in a mill where labor conditions are worse than anywhere else in this locality, where the labor turnover is the heaviest in the section, and where the worst class of labor to be found anywhere near is located,” he declared.

This is a condition found in many places where the mill houses only a portion of the employees and the transient help rents from commercial landlords, in the opinion of Mr. Edmonds. The Loray management is now building a number of houses to do away with this condition.

Mr. Edmonds found the strikers well fed, he said, although no one knows how long the landlords are going to let them remain in their houses. Most of them are anxious to talk about their troubles and tell great stories of how there are many workers working for wages of from $6 to $9 on full time, but investigation shows that they are all making $10 to $15 and no concrete evidence of lower wages can be obtained, according to Mr. Edmonds.

Condemns Strikers

Mr. Edmonds had little of complimentary nature to say about the strikers. One of them, he declared, “told me he’d just been released from an insane asylum before getting his job at Loray. Another, a woman, must have been vaccinated with a victrola needle—she had such a line of complaints to make.”

He described the crowds of strikers as a “cesspool of humanity” and said that Beal had badly misled them in a number of ways. Mr. Edmonds returned to Baltimore yesterday.

As you read

This news story was printed by the Charlotte Observer and reprinted in the local Gastonia Daily Gazette. The Observer, like many other newspapers, favored the position of the management and mill owners. Both newspapers chose to print accounts of the strike that depicted the striking workers unfavorably.

This newspaper story reported that Robert Edmonds, editor for the business magazine Maufacturers’ Record of Baltimore, had visited the Loray Mill. In his statements to the paper, Edmonds dismissed the workers’ complaints and assured readers that striking workers did not pose a “real” threat.

As the strike dragged on, the unrest in Gastonia began drawing national attention. The visit of Edmonds to the mill was just one example of how the strike at the Loray Mill had attracted the attention of the media and federal government.

The strike at Loray was only one of several strikes at textile mills in the South during 1929. Workers in South Carolina, Tennessee, and in other mills in North Carolina, also walked out in hopes of pressuring mill owners to improve living conditions in mill villages, increase wages, reduce the number of hours of work, and improve safety and working conditions.

Questions to consider

Why did Edmonds believe that the strikers did not pose a “real” threat?

What words did Edmonds use to describe the striking workers?

How did Edmonds describe the people who had taken over the jobs left vacant by strikers?

Why did Edmonds believe workers at the Loray Mill had followed Beal and gone on strike?

Do you think Edmonds, as the editor of a magazine for businessmen, was a fair observer of the strike? Why or why not?

If you were a striking worker at the mill, how might you respond to this report?

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